Something about teenage coming-of-age dramedies hits me hard every time. I particularly consider Lady Bird one of my favorite films of all time, as I find it deeply relatable. Despite the fact that I never went through high school as a teenage girl, didn’t have a tumultuous relationship with my mother or never found my boyfriend kissing a guy in a bathroom stall. Something about it resonated with me emotionally, maybe in ways I can’t describe. So then imagine how I felt watching Dìdi, a film about Chris Wang, a first-generation Chinese boy about to go into high school, struggling with his own identity, as Chinese, as a skate “filmer”, and as a man himself. Spoiler: I share more than a few of these exact traits with Chris, finding myself multiple times throughout the film cringing at moments throughout Chris’s life, knowing exactly what he must be feeling, because it is exactly what I felt. Seemingly, I was not the only one who resonated with the film so deeply, as Dìdi, writer and director Sean Wang’s narrative debut, won both Jury and Audience awards at Sundance this year. Clearly, there is something about this kid that resonates with all of us.
From the moment the film starts to when it ends, we are immersed in the Fremont, California of 2008, both when and where Wang grew up. It doesn’t take much to infer that this film is partially auto-biographical, and with Wang essentially filming in his hometown, the passion he has for the place oozes out of the screen. The film has an exuberant sense of place and time, drawing directly from Wang’s life there and there is a clear love for the highways, the dingy garages, and the dark Chinese restaurants that Chris inhabits throughout the film. But Chris lives two lives, one in Fremont and one online, on YouTube, AOL Messenger, and MySpace. These digital spaces exude the same love, with complete accuracy as to what these websites looked like at the time. But this accuracy and love is not some vapid nostalgia for a childhood past, instead these websites hold so much of the heart and intensity of the film. These spaces are where Chris truly expresses himself and connects with his friends, a key fulcrum in discovering who he is and what he wants. The film treats these spaces with the loving tension that Chris applies to them himself. When Chris sends an AOL Message to his crush and eagerly awaits a response, we feel his same relief at the chime of her incoming message.
So much of this emotional connection is directly due to Izaac Wang’s (no relation to director Sean) performance as Chris. Wang portrays Chris with such earnestness and honesty that it’s hard to believe that, unlike his character being 13 in 2008, Wang was 13 in 2020. Despite this, Chris feels like a real person, a real kid you could remember from your own childhood. The audience can see through Chris’s facade, desperately trying to fit in with the sexist and homophobic culture of the time. But we know he doesn’t mean it. Chris has this idea of masculinity projected on him, but no matter where he goes, he doesn’t fit it. Like any 13 year-old kid, Chris wrestles with the fact of not wanting to be a child anymore, but still knowing nothing. Wang presents this struggle, despite its complexity, with a sense of clarity and realism, perhaps aided by his proximity to that age.
If any of that wasn’t hard enough for Chris, he also deeply struggles with his identity as Chinese. When he is unfairly mocked at school, he’s just supposed to be a man and put up with it. He tells his cool older friends he is only “half-Asian”, no matter how much it would hurt his mom (portrayed by the amazing Joan Chen) to hear that. That’s Chris’s issue, not caring how much anything hurts his mom. Or his sister, for that matter, the two lashing out at each other, sometimes with a dash of sibling love and sometimes not. No matter how much they love him, Chris (again, 13) rejects his family. Chen’s portrayal of the mother shares Wang’s sincerity, with an intense sense of lived experience too. It’s difficult to watch the two fight, but if you’ve ever been 13, you know how that feels and you know they don’t mean it. While this relationship does feel a little rushed, resolving conflict and ending the film a little too quickly, it is poignant nonetheless.
Even if you don’t directly relate to Chris, have never been called “cute for an Asian guy” or a “Fremont Asian Gangsta”, there is something resonant within Dìdi. The film’s tagline “For anyone who’s ever been a teenager” proves strikingly true.
Anthony Zayneh can be reached at [email protected].